


You Are Here (the only home we've ever known)

by callunavulgari



Series: Dark Month Collection [40]
Category: Percy Jackson and the Olympians - Rick Riordan
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Space, Body Horror, Consent Issues, Fuck Or Die, M/M, Mildly Dubious Consent, Parasites, Post-Apocalypse, Sex Pollen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-15
Updated: 2013-10-15
Packaged: 2017-12-29 12:48:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,332
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1005653
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/callunavulgari/pseuds/callunavulgari
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He meets a boy on Spaceport Delta 0037 when he is fifteen—a boy that feels like home. He smells of the sunshine on the sea and Nico stares at him as he passes, eyes wide. Seventy years after earth met its end, most cryo pods failing miserably in transit, most humans who’d ever buried their toes in the sand of Earth-That-Was were either dead or in their eighties and up, but this boy sings to him—this boy makes him think of long summer days on the Mediterranean with his mother, before Zeus dropped a building on her head. Nico stares at him, mouth dry, and when Nico’s lips finally part on the word ‘hello,’ the boy is gone.</p>
            </blockquote>





	You Are Here (the only home we've ever known)

**Author's Note:**

> Dark Month, Day 15. So, I was listening to space playlists while I was writing this, right? Which was awesome, but then [this](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PN5JJDh78I) came on during one of them and I don't know, I have a lot of feelz about space in general. Watch this video, listen to this, and I dare you—I fucking dare you to not get at least a little shiny-eyed.

He remembers a time in his life when the worst thing he had to worry about was not getting a turn at the Pac-Man machine. It was a long time ago, before Hades had smuggled him and his sister onto a spaceship, destination who the fuck knows.   
  
He’d come out of cryo seventy years later, disoriented, with his sister peering down at him.  
  
His life after that had become one giant clusterfuck of spaceport after spaceport. Being a half-blood in space is strange—he can’t feel the earth move under his feet, can’t feel the bones of all his people before him. He can feel echoes of his power whenever whatever ship he’s on passes through an asteroid belt or when they settle on some strange, foreign planet. Space travel is still new enough that most people this far out still live out of their ships or in large, community space stations. There aren’t enough planets in the goldilocks zones and terraforming is still something even newer than space travel.  
  
Once, he and his sister had visited a Class 7 planet made entirely of a substance that sang to his very bones, so very much like the soil back home. He’d felt echoes of it up and down his spine for weeks and from the look in her eyes, Bianca felt it too.  
  
He meets a boy on Spaceport Delta 0037 when he is fifteen—a boy that feels like home. He smells of the sunshine on the sea and Nico stares at him as he passes, eyes wide. Seventy years after earth met its end, most cryo pods failing miserably, most humans who’d ever buried their toes in the sand of Earth-That-Was were either dead or in their eighties and up, but this boy sings to him—this boy makes him think of long summer days on the Mediterranean with his mother, before Zeus dropped a building on her head. Nico stares at him, mouth dry, and when Nico’s lips finally part on the word ‘hello,’ the boy is gone.  
  
He grows into his body awkwardly, shooting up like a beanstalk until he’s stretched long and tight in his own skin, like a comic book character. Only he has no magical powers, because he is billions of lightyears away from the graveyard of his planet and can only feel the bonedust in the air when there’s been a major catastrophe.

.  
  
He is nineteen when he next uses his powers. He’s just gotten his pilot’s license and is carting some precious cargo to a nearby planet when a star goes nova a few thousand miles away. When it collapses into a black hole he can _feel_ it, feel the endless void and shadow.   
  
Nico had never been to his father’s kingdom before it was lost, but he imagines that this is what the underworld must have felt like.   
  
He’s staring out his viewports, jaw slack as the black hole sinks its tendrils into his ship, drawing it closer and closer. Nico’s crew is panicking, but he’s just sitting there, feeling the inevitability of death sink into his skin. He’s in his element—this is him; death, destruction, and chaos all wrapped up into a monstrous vacuum. The ship is creaking all around him and the shadows are stretching.  
  
He blinks, slowly, feeling his eyelashes drag against his skin, and when he opens his eyes again, he and his crew are still sitting in their ship, only the ship is sitting on Andromeda 00 Delta Vega.  
  
When they call in a few moments later, his leading officer barks questions at everyone in the room, anyone who can possibly explain what the fuck just happened and how they ended up _thirty million light years_ off course.   
  
When it’s his turn, Nico just stares at him, still feeling punch-drunk from using his powers in such a huge way after eighty some years of going without. “I don’t know, sir,” he breathes, his eyes dark, pupils blown wide like they drank some of the event in and swallowed the void.  
  
Later, Bianca will tell him through a vidport that she felt him. All those thousands of miles away with her band of badass female bounty hunters and she _felt_ him fall through the shadows—felt him swallow the abyss.  
  
“It was terrifying, Nico,” she says, shivering. “Like watching you swallow a star.”  
  
Her eyes are as dark as his, and when he looks at her, he feels like just maybe there’s a crack of the abyss in her too.  
  
.  
  
He doesn’t know if his father is dead or not. His dad was the _god_ of the dead, but what happens to a god when your kingdom is destroyed? What happened to all those souls? Did the Underworld and Olympus shift their way to a different planet, or did the old gods die with their feet firmly planted in the soil they’d emerged from?  
  
He doesn’t know.   
  
What he does know is that he is twenty-five years old and now that he’s fallen into the shadows once, he feels them everywhere. He uses them, sometimes, when he needs to. Space is one long endless stretch of cold-hard vacuum, one giant tapestry of shadow. It’s easy enough to dip his ship into a patch of darkness when they’ve got a deadline to meet or need a safe evac.  
  
He is twenty-five years old and has barely grown into his body.   
  
“You don’t look a day older than eighteen,” his new commander tells him the day he meets her. She blinks down at her records and double takes. “You were born on Earth-That-Was?” she gasps, and she’s thirty, maybe forty years old, probably hadn’t seen their _galaxy_ much less their old beautiful blue-green marble of a planet.  
  
“My sister and I’s cryo pods worked,” he answers, feeling a surge of guilt go through him. He wonders if his dad bent the rules for them, his last gift, changing their fates. He remembers the boy from all those years ago, who smelled like the sea on a summer day and sang to Nico’s skeleton, like a matching set, and wonders if all the gods bent the rules for their children.  
  
“Well,” she says. “Can’t say I’ve ever commanded someone who was around before I was even conceived, but there’s a first time for everything, yeah?”  
  
He blinks at her and smiles hesitantly, his muscles fighting him every step of the way.  
  
.  
  
Nico meets the boy for real the year that he turns twenty-seven. He still looks like a teenager, as does Bianca, and apparently this boy does as well.  
  
He’s commanding a platoon of strike troopers, descending to an unmarked world when he recognizes one of his troopers—the sweep of dark hair and the glint of green eyes the exact shade of the sea. He blinks and it’s only then that he feels the pull—hears the singing vibrate through his bones.  
  
The boy’s expression goes sideways, lips pulling down into a frown. The trooper next to him thumps him on the back, asks him if he’s alright, but the boy just waves him off, shaking his head.  
  
He glances around, eyes confused, and now that Nico’s looking at him, he sticks out like a sore thumb in a cabin full of thirty-something year old men. That youth, it doesn’t sit quite right on either of their faces—makes their eyes look positively ancient.   
  
Nico’s still staring at him when the boy finds him in the crowd, eyes widening. The pull is stronger, like gravity itself wants to push them together—the earth against the sea.  
  
 _Poseidon_ , Nico mouths, suddenly sure of it. That’s why the boy smelled so much like the sea—seafoam was in his blood, same as graveyard soil and bonedust was in Nico’s. The boy smiles, like he can’t help it, and Nico can feel the muscles of his face twitching, pulling his lips into something that probably only superficially resembles a smile.   
  
The boy comes to him later, when the ship has quieted. Most of the crew are asleep, but sleep won’t find Nico, so he’s sitting in the tiny mess hall when the boy staggers in, rubbing sleep from his eyes.  
  
They both freeze when they see each other, something age-old simmering in his blood. Familiarity is a myth nowadays—everything he touches is strange and cold except for the shadows licking at the hull of his ship and slipping around corners.   
  
The boy’s shoulders go loose before Nico’s, and he sees it when the other half-blood comes to a decision.  
  
He isn’t surprised that the boy marches up and slips into the seat across from him, staring at Nico like he’s the answer to a question he hadn’t known he was asking.   
  
“You feel like home,” the boy says and his voice is lilting and soft, save for a thready rasp on the hard consonants, like a sunburn in the rain.  
  
He smiles, blinking the abyss out of of his eyes. “So do you.”  
  
“I’m Percy,” the boy who’s not quite a boy tells him. “Percy Jackson. Son of Poseidon.”  
  
It makes Nico’s smile stretch, the way he says it, like he’s so unused to even thinking the words that his tongue swells in protest when he _does_ try to say it. “Nico di Angelo,” he says, saluting him with his coffee mug, words a whisper of shadow and bone-dust between them. “Son of Hades.”  
  
Percy blinks those ocean eyes at him and says, “I’ve never met one of us before.”  
  
Nico sips at his coffee. “I’ve only ever felt my sister,” he says. Then, because that feels like a lie. “I saw you once too, in a spaceport when I was fifteen. You felt like sunshine on the sea and your bones sang to me of a home I only ever see in my dreams.”  
  
Percy startles a little. “I didn’t feel you then,” he says, like he’s been betrayed by his own body.  
  
Nico shrugs. “I was pretty little. I wouldn’t have felt me either.”  
  
.  
  
Percy stays with him until they arrive at Spaceport 3892 Gamma, on the very edge of known space. The void beyond calls to Nico, lulling him into half-sleep with whispers of their secrets.   
  
“What are you gonna do now?” Percy asks him. He’s still wearing his trooper uniform and Nico’s own captain’s garb itches at the collar. It isn’t quite unusual for a captain to be seen speaking with the ‘lowly’ troopers, but they’re still getting strange looks from the civilians that pass them by.   
  
He reaches out and catches one of Percy’s hands, uses it to tug him down several corridors and into what are temporarily Nico’s quarters. They’ll be reassigned when he leaves, but until now, they're all his—the privileges of being a captain.  
  
Percy’s giving him this half-amused look and rubbing the faint red marks on his wrist. “What was that for?” he asks softly.   
  
“I don’t like it when people stare,” Nico sighs, slumping onto his bed. It’s uncomfortable, lumpy, but better than the beds most people are getting. Percy cautiously takes a seat next to him. Their sides brush.  
  
“So what are you going to do?” he asks, setting a careful hand on Nico’s thigh. It’s a gentle pressure, but Nico isn’t used to being touched—doesn’t usually like it, unless it’s Bianca. With Percy, it’s surprisingly okay. The knob of Percy’s wrist presses against a small hole in his pants and where their skin touches, images of waves slapping up against the hull of a ship bloom just under Nico’s skin. Percy’s eyelashes flutter and Nico knows he’s getting the same weird feedback. Maybe he’s seeing the bone-dust in the air or hearing the call of the void they’re sitting on the cusp of.  
  
Whatever it is, Percy lingers in it, until he recovers and pulls back moments later.   
  
He blinks, coming back to himself, and stares at Nico like he’s something new. “You want to go to it, don’t you,” he whispers, answering his own question. Seems like he heard the call of the void after all.   
  
“We, as humans, are constantly exploring, expanding our reach across the stars,” he explains, feeling like he’s drowning in Percy’s ocean-green eyes. “I just want to be the one to explore it this time.”  
  
“You want to find our fathers, don’t you?” Percy guesses, haphazardly. His thumb has somehow managed to find it’s way back onto Nico’s leg, though he’s careful to avoid skin. Nico winces.  
  
“I want answers,” he corrects. “If I happen to find my father and the rest of the gods' hidey-hole, well, that won’t exactly be a bad thing either.”  
  
Percy hums, low in his throat. His thumb is still stroking Nico’s knee. “I want to go with you,” he says, finger accidentally brushing across the hole again. It leaves an afterimage behind like a shooting star—a stretch of ice, the Northern lights above making it dance with color.  
  
He wonders what image Percy got in return.  
  
“Okay,” he whispers, and the void _sings_.  
  
.  
  
They don’t get approval from the Empire, which means that when they set out, it’s just them in a tiny little shuttle that Nico buys with some of the credits he’s got stashed away. When they’re an hour into the abyss, not even at warp speed, Bianca calls.  
  
She’s got new tattoos this time, her hair pulled back into terrifyingly long dreadlocks. Her dark eyes are panicked.   
  
“Nico,” she gasps. “I can’t _feel_ you. Why can’t I feel you?”  
  
He’s never been able to feel her bones echo across space before—that was her skill and hers alone, knowing where he was at all times. Beside him, Percy is sleepily peering up at her from the copilot’s chair.   
  
“It’s okay, Bianca,” Nico assures her. “I’m fine.”  
  
“But _why_ can’t I feel you?” she hisses—something between a whisper and a shriek.  
  
“We crossed over into uncharted space about an hour ago,” Percy almost-slurs, still mostly asleep. He’d been napping when she called. Her attention flicks to him and she frowns.  
  
“Who’s that?” she asks, brow wrinkling up in confusion. He can’t blame her. He isn’t very fond of most people.   
  
“Percy Jackson, son of Poseidon,” he goes, and watches the disbelief chase its way across her face.  
  
.  
  
They’re thirty-five years old and just beginning to look like proper adults when they visit a planet that whisper-sings to them both. It yanks at their attention, insistent, until Nico growls and veers them off-course.  
  
“It doesn’t feel like home,” Percy frowns, peering out at the tiny speck in the distance. “But it feels like _something_.”  
  
It feels dark, like splintered shards of volcanic glass. The songs it purrs into the void coats his brain, sticky like tar. He doesn’t like it.  
  
He begins the descent anyway.  
  
.  
  
In retrospect, they probably should have turned away and never looked back, because it isn’t Olympus or the Underworld waiting for them. It’s _Tartarus_ , and they may have been young when the world blew up, but the monsters still want to eat them.  
  
When they make it back to their ship, tired and aching, their throats are burning from the fire-water, skin covered in blisters and swollen sores.   
  
“That was a terrible idea,” Percy says, staring out the side viewport. Tartarus fades away from them, whisper-singing to them as they go. It leaves a bad taste in his mouth.  
  
“Agreed,” he sighs. “But at least we know one thing.”  
  
“What?”  
  
He grins. “If Tartarus has reformed, that means Olympus has too.  
  
.  
  
It’s been a few months of nothing but space, and their ship is really tiny, just the control room (which barely has enough space for both of them), a small sleeping area, and an even tinier kitchen. They amp up the artificial gravity when they’re exercising, but there’s still not enough space to really stretch their legs. So at first he assumes that’s why they’re so lethargic, so sleepy that sometimes they have to turn on the automatic controls and sleep for eighteen hours straight.   
  
It’s not until he catches sight of something growing out of Percy’s still open cuts that he realizes something is really, really wrong.  
  
He has them too—these tiny, silvery black growths, like mushroom caps gone wrong. They turn his stomach, makes him want to rip a hole in reality and send the things into the abyss. Percy’s calmer about it than he is, acting like there’s nothing wrong.  
  
“They’re organic,” Percy shrugs, sending him a weirdly blissed out grin.   
  
They’re from Tartarus, Nico’s sure of it. They feel wrong and horrifying, but sometimes, when he isn’t freaking out, they also feel right—like home. He tries ripping them out, but it hurts—so fucking much, like trying to scrape out his liver with a toothpick. Eventually, he stops trying.  
  
“I kind of like them,” Percy confesses one day. The bend of his elbow is covered in them, same as the area just over Nico’s heart, where a hellhound had tried to dig it out. He remembers seeing the spores, those weird neon things on the edge of one of the rivers there, like giant flowering mushrooms, but at the time he’d been more concerned with the monsters trying to tear him and Percy apart.   
  
“We can’t go back to civilization like this, Percy,” he whispers, scratching at them through his shirt. They just feel lumpy when they’re hidden under his shirt like this, nothing like actually touching the lobes. It feels wrong to say it, because civilization is where they need to go—and it’s thoughts like that that make him realize why they can’t. “We don’t know how they spread.”  
  
Percy gives him an injured look and presses up close to him, eyes lidding with pleasure when their skin presses together. It isn’t quite as disorienting anymore, Percy’s skin a picture book of almost-memories when it’s tucked up against his. It’s calming, nice.  
  
They don’t need fuel, the ship’s solar powered, so unless they’re away from a sun for too long, they’ll be fine power-wise. They have enough rations and water to last them years, and can always find a planet somewhere to hunt if they’re close to running out. They don’t need to go back, but the human side of Nico longs for it almost as much as the parasites do.  
  
.  
  
It takes the growths a year to flower and when they do, they release spores into the air around them, like glittering flecks of neon blue-black light. Nico sneezes and Percy sighs, trembling against him. It’s getting harder and harder to spend fifteen minutes without touching him, and though Nico isn’t unaware of the subtle attraction between them, he’s pretty sure it’s not that.  
  
“They want us to mate,” Percy mutters one time, mostly asleep and delirious with dream-fever. He’s burning up against Nico’s side, but he’s shivering like he’s in the middle of the arctic, like he’s out in the hard-vacuum of space without a suit.   
  
“They _what_ ,” Nico says, giving him a weird look, but Percy’s already conked out against his shoulder again.  
  
Eventually it gets bad enough that they’re almost always on auto-pilot, piled into their shitty cot, half on top of each other.   
  
“One of us should really be piloting the ship,” Percy says seriously. It’s one of the times that he’s mostly lucid and Nico’s far from it. Percy’s eyes look like whirlpools in the darkness.  
  
Their eyes started glowing a few weeks before the spores showed up. Percy’s are the same neon-blue of the actual plants, Nico’s are the shiny near-purple black of his own growths. Whatever’s fucking up their eyes gives them great night-vision though and so far it hasn’t hurt them.   
  
He mumbles something into Percy’s skin, dragging his lips against Percy’s collarbone. Percy’s breath hitches and he shifts, making Nico grumble as he’s forced to readjust his position.  
  
“Let me fuck you,” he hears himself mutter, muffled like there’s cotton in his ears.  
  
Percy stares at him for a minute, biting down on his lip before nodding sharply, extricating himself from Nico’s arms. Nico whines, reaching for him, but Percy’s just taking off his clothes, which is a good thing. Very good thing. Nico hears himself make a weird chirping noise when Percy reaches down and tenderly starts to pull Nico’s clothes off.  
  
When he’s settled back on the bed, laying in the vee of Nico’s parted thighs, Nico purrs and strokes at the silky-soft stalks protruding from his skin. His hips twitch, cock rubbing against Percy’s, and he whines again.   
  
There’s lube somewhere, which apparently Percy finds, because when Nico blinks back to awareness again, he’s holding it.  
  
“I’m sorry,” Percy is saying, pressing his fingers between his own thighs. He hisses a little, and Nico itches with the desire to help—the need to slide his own fingers down and investigate. “You were right, before. This isn’t right, but I think this is the only way to keep them from killing us.”  
  
“They want us to mate,” Nico says happily, Percy’s words spilling from his mouth.   
  
Percy nods gravely, and something inside Nico is screaming, because it isn’t right for Percy to look like that.  
  
When Nico blinks back again the abyss is singing to him and the sea is crashing loud in his ears, Percy sinking slowly back onto his cock.   
  
He croons, and doesn’t recognize his own voice.  
  
Percy moves above him carefully, lifting himself almost off of Nico’s cock before sinking back down again. Sweat beads at his temple and his erection has flagged, so Nico knows it’s hurting him, at least a little.  
  
Nico reaches out and tugs on Percy’s cock, grinning dreamily when Percy gasps, his rhythm stuttering. He can tell when it starts feeling better, because Percy’s eyes go glazed with pleasure and he starts bouncing on Nico’s dick with enthusiasm, soft cries emerging from his throat like they’ve been strangled out of him.   
  
Nico comes first and feels bad about it for about twelve seconds before Percy gives out a little yell and follows him over the edge.   
  
He sleeps and when he wakes up again, the fever is gone.  
  
Their eyes are still glowing and their growths are still emitting spores like it’s glitter at a pride parade, but it doesn’t hurt anymore.  
  
He and Percy don’t talk for a day and a half before Nico gets irritated and straddles him in bed one night, leaning down to kiss him proper.  
  
.  
  
“I see you’ve gotten yourself into a real bind, haven’t you,” is the first thing that Poseidon says to his son. Nico shifts next to Percy, awkwardly, and tries to hide the bruise in the shape of Percy’s lips against his neck.  
  
Hades—Nico’s _dad_ —is watching them from a little further away. He doesn’t look disappointed, but he hasn’t approached them either.  
  
Olympus is located on a small planet in the goldilocks zone of two tiny blue dwarf stars about as far away from Earth-That-Was that someone could get. The soil and sea sing to him, reigniting the shadows curling against his bones. He’s been touching Percy for so long now that he feels half descended from the sea-god himself—the waves and water are his life-blood, the rich soil his skin and muscle.   
  
“Yeah,” Percy admits, nodding. “Don’t suppose you can help?”  
  
Poseidon studies their growths for a moment before nodding, decisively, and sighing, “Let me go find Demeter.”  
  
.  
  
“They’re so beautiful,” Demeter coos. She’s entirely too close to him, and she smells like honeysuckle. For a moment she seems to forget that she’s crouching in front of the son of the man who stole her daughter away, because she looks up at him, eyes shining, and asks, “Are you _sure_ you want to get rid of them?”  
  
He nods, frantically, not quite able to refrain from shuddering when she plucks one of them with her fingernail, like playing a note on the piano. He feels it vibrate all the way through the roots and nearly retches.  
  
“Please,” he whispers and she sighs, sadly.   
  
“If you insist.”  
  
“We do,” Percy says from beside him.   
  
.  
  
After so long with the things, their absence grates on him. For now, they’ve been given a place to stay in Olympus until they recover enough to even think about going out into the world and building a home. It’ll be easy enough between them, a son of the sea and a son of the earth, but they’re not quite there yet.  
  
The gravity of this planet is ever so slightly off, so they feel heavy, sluggish.   
  
They can breathe though—breathe in the sweet smell of nature, even if half the plants around them are completely foreign—and every corner of this little blue planet sings of home.  
  
He calls Bianca, Percy sleeping against his shoulder, and she screams when she sees him, tears of relief pouring down her face.  
  
“We found it,” he tells her. “We found Olympus.”  
  
He doesn’t say anything about his father, because besides for a short hello, Hades has said nothing to him. _Poseidon_ has been more welcoming, even after he found out that Nico was sleeping with his son.   
  
Athena had told them one night that the monsters from home had yet to find them, staying in Tartarus. It wouldn’t last for long, she warned them. But for now it was safe.  
  
He gives Bianca coordinates and sends her a sleepy smile when Percy drools against his neck. Somewhere in the back of his head, waves are slapping against the shoreline. “You have to bring them here, Bianca,” he tells her.  
  
She looks up, pen cap clenched between her teeth.  
  
“Who?”  
  
His smile widens into a grin, the bone-dust and soil singing a song he’d almost forgotten. Percy snores a little and warmth blossoms beneath his breastbone when he opens his mouth to speak.  
  
“Everyone,” he breathes. “It’s time for them to come home.”  
  



End file.
